Srećko Horvat: In May, as a participant of the big international conference
on Socialism, you are coming to a country which had an experience with
the the Yugoslavian version of socialism in the last century. Could you
explain why socialism in the 21st century?

April 22, 2010 -- The Future on Fire -- A common chant around the
world when people take to the streets against the crimes of the global
capitalist system is: "This is what democracy looks like!"

It is
a statement that real democracy is on the streets, in the united action
of ordinary people. It is a statement that democracy is more than
passive voting once every few years, it is popular power and direct
participation.

March 22, 2010 -- The free, sovereign and independent
homeland of our dreams will only come true if we radicalise the process
and speed up the transition to socialism”, Venezuela's President Hugo
Chavez wrote in his March 14 weekly column “Chavez Lines”.

The Venezuelan government has launched a number of initiatives in recent
weeks aimed to tackle threats to the revolutionary process — including
from elements within the pro-Chavez camp that seek to undermine plans to
deepen the revolution.

Central to this are new measures aimed at speeding up the transfer of
power to organised communities.

Chavez wrote in his February 21 column: “The time has come for
communities to assume the powers of state, which will lead
administratively to the total transformation of the Venezuelan state and
socially to the real exercise of sovereignty by society through
communal powers.”

Participatory democracy

The previous day, Chavez announced the creation of the federal
government council in front of thousands of armed peasants that are part
of the newly created peasant battalions in the Bolivarian militia.

November 5, 2009 -- Venezuelanalysis.com -- On
the question of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, Michael
Lebowitz is one of the thinkers who has penetrated deepest into our
process. He plunges his scrutinising gaze into its most diverse and
conflicting issues, in order to calmly and forcefully reveal its
truth with knifelike clarity. He talks like a peasant or a worker who
dips into the reality that they experience, that they suffer and feel.

At the Centro Internacional Miranda, I had a chance to converse with
Lebowitz, a professor from the Simon Fraser University in British
Columbia (Canada).

August 22, 2009 -- Socialist Resistance -- Today, the twin drivers of economic recession and the
possibility of catastrophic climate change are beginning to push
working people towards action. A series of small-scale but high-profile
occupations of threatened factories, not just at Vestas wind turbine plant but also at
Visteon car plant, where 600 workers took on the might of Ford and won a greatly
enhanced redundancy package, show what is possible. In the 1970s workers at Britain's Lucas Aerospace went even further. We look back at the lessons of Lucas Aerospace.

It is clear that if we are to avert catastrophic climate change by
moving rapidly to a low-carbon economy, certain industries will have to
be wound down or drastically scaled back, for example, the power
generation, aviation and car industries. However, rather than this
leading to a net loss of jobs, efforts must be put into creating new
green jobs or ``converting'' old jobs.

Caracas -- July 25, 2009 -- On July 22, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez again declared his complete support for the proposal by industrial workers for a new model of production based on workers’ control.

This push from Chavez, part of the socialist revolution, aims at
transforming Venezuela’s basic industry. However, it faces resistance
from within the state bureaucracy and the revolutionary movement. Presenting his government’s “Plan Socialist Guayana 2009-2019”,
Chavez said the state-owned companies in basic industry have to be
transformed into “socialist companies”.

The plan was the result of several weeks of intense discussion
among revolutionary workers from the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana
(CVG). The CVG includes 15 state-owned companies in the industrial
Guayana region involved in steel, iron ore, mineral and aluminium
production.

The workers’ roundtables were established after a May 21 workshop,
where industrial workers raised radical proposals for the socialist
transformation of basic industry. Chavez addressed the workshop in support of many of the proposals.

[Michael Lebowitz will be a featured guest at the World at a Crossroads conference, to be held in Sydney, Australia, on April 10-12, 2009, organised by the Democratic Socialist Perspective, Resistance and Green Left Weekly. Visit http://www.worldATACrossroads.org for full agenda and to book your tickets. Find other articles by Michael Lebowitz HERE.]

[Presentation at the launch of El
Camino al Desarrollo Humano: ¿Capitalismo o Socialismo?(The Path to Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism?) at the
Venezuelan International Book Fair, Filven, in Caracas on November 8, 2008. The English
version of the pamphlet will be published in a forthcoming edition of Monthly Review.]

Richard Wolff is professor of economics at UMass Amherst. He talks about the underlying cause of the current capitalist crisis (NOT ``financial'' crisis) and capitalism in general. Socialism and workers' democracy is presented as the alternative. The talk was presented by the Association for Economic and Social Analysis and the journal Rethinking Marxism in early October 2008.

The
following is the keynote address to the annual meeting of the Society for
Socialist Studies, Vancouver, June 5, 2008. It was originally titled ``Building socialism for the 21st century''. To hear an audio recording of the speech, click HERE.

By Michael A. Lebowitz

A spectre
is haunting capitalism. It is the spectre of socialism for the 21st century. Increasingly,
the characteristics of this spectre are becoming clear, and we are able to see
enough to understand what it is not. The only thing that is not clear at this
point is whether the spectre is real – i.e., whether it is actually an earthly
presence.

[A
talk given at the two-day seminar “Workers Management: Theory and Practise”,
held on October 26 and 27, 2007, organised by the Human Development and
Transformative Praxis Program at the Caracas-based Miranda International
Centre. Lebowitz is the director of the program. A detailed report by Green Left Weekly’s Kiraz Janickeon the seminar is posted at http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2784
]